"I kept thinking about General Rommel, kept seeing his eyes in my mind. I can see them now, how they
looked on his face, full of shame. It was absolute shame and he knew we knew. It was
something he couldn’t talk about, I bet. If he could have talked to us, we might have
been taken to one of their prison camps. But he knew he couldn’t do that to us. Make
amends is what he had to do. He had to give us another chance. Just like we gave Ellen
Kirby another chance at drowning.”

In his short flight he had circled all the way back to the Kirby circumstance and what
played with it.

Francis Dever Parkinson, tanker sergeant, survivor of Tobruk and other places in the
northern horrors of Africa, who walked away from death in the sand on more than one
occasion, who might be called Rommel’s last known foe, who rolled over three cars
on U.S. Route 1 and waged several major bouts with John Barleycorn thereafter in his
time, who got to know the insidious trek of cancer in his slight frame, whom I loved
more than any comrade that had shared a hole with me, who hurt practically every day
of his life after his return from Africa, hung on for twenty-five more torturous and
tumultuous and mind-driven years, knowing ever Egypt’s two dark eyes.